The gospel of Matthew

Written off as a romcom himbo, resurrected as an Oscar-winning leading man, Matthew McConaughey has gone Interstellar with Christopher Nolan. Here, as our December edition cover star, he shares his rules for life with GQ.

Here, as our December edition cover star, he shares his rules for life with GQ.

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Matthew McConaughey has a collection, on his MacBook Pro, of 924 original "rhetorisms, aphorisms, truthisms", and the occasional line he has culled from a bumper sticker.

He tends to them like a gardener, trimming here and there, and adds to them, for more than 25 years now, like a collector of vintage toys - carefully, with purpose, each one arriving in mint condition from the McConaughey brain.

Some, like "Find your frequency" (701), are relatively new to the collection, and have the distinction of being both self-explanatory and self-fulfilling. It was only added after he realised - whatcha know - said frequency had already been found. But in case he forgets, there it is.

Others are useful, but old, slightly faded and yellowed now in the sun of McConaughey's recent success. One, which sits in the early hundreds, reads: "Less impressed, but more involved" (262).

This is the advice he gave himself in the mid-Nineties, as he was about to start work on the sci-fi film Contact, and was trying not to be overawed by working with director Robert Zemeckis and star Jodie Foster. He does not need this advice any more.

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Nearly all are just a sentence or two in length, yet many are but the tips of anecdotal icebergs - great hulking tales that spawned them lying just beneath the surface.

Take this one: "It is not about whether you win or lose. It is whether you accept the challenge" (402).

This stems from the time, he says, he fought an African tribesman. He was staying in a small village on the Niger River in 1999, in one of the many jaunts the 45-year-old used to take every time his bed felt too soft, but which, for now, have taken a back seat, mainly due to his 2012 marriage to model Camila Alves and the subsequent sprouting of a family of three. ("No. It's not as easy to hop up and head off to northwest Africa like I used to.")

The tribespeople had got wind of the fact a large white man was staying nearby. And decided - perhaps due to his six-foot frame, perhaps due to the muscles that at the time were being deployed on beaches and romcom posters across the US - that he was a warrior.

So they marched over and explained, via McConaughey's interpreter, that the champion of the village wrestlers wanted to challenge the Strong White Man, and, by way of explanation, pointed to a man the size of a Portaloo, wearing a burlap sack; he, in turn, pointed to a sandpit. Much grappling, grabbing, sweating, punching and bleeding later, as he gulped in air and the crowd roared, McConaughey asked a bystander, with understandable interest, "Did I win?"

Photography by Norman Jean Roy

It was only later that he realised the answer was moot, and hence, the entry, sometime after that, now smack-bang in the list's middle: "It is not about whether you win or lose. It is whether you accept the challenge."

But, he says, his current favourite is slightly more obscure.

It's an old one, but one, he adds, he's been thinking about more and more lately. Because it is the one that is central to the reason behind his career change, the one that explains one of Hollywood's most dramatic comeback stories, which saw, in just three years, Matthew McConaughey go from shirtless romcom himbo and the guy once arrested for playing bongos in the nude, to indie-film darling, Oscar-winning golden boy, and now the star of Interstellar, the most ambitious film yet from Christopher Nolan, who just happens to be one of the biggest directors in the world.

The line is simply this: "If you want your jeans ironed" (188).

We know what you're thinking: what the hell does that mean?

But trust us, there's a great story behind it. If there's one thing you can be sure of, it's that McConaughey is good at those.

If part of the fun of hanging out with McConaughey is listening to his stories - each told in a considered Texan drawl, vowels not so much spoken as tasted - the irony doesn't escape him that he's only here telling them because his own one is so unlikely.

It's a Hollywood staple for talented but unstable bad boys (take your pick from Robert Downey Jr to Mickey Rourke) to clean up and make good. But someone who just took the easy option? The guy who was fêted as the next Paul Newman - as he was after 1996's A Time To Kill - only to fall on the romcom mat and stay there? As Jon Hamm put it to GQ recently, describing McConaughey's improbable resurrection: "The guy from Failure To Launch?"

Woody Harrelson, his lifelong friend and True Detective co-star, says, "I've never known a guy who's more divisive. You know, they've seen him too many times with his shirt off, or whatever. There's something about Matthew - he's so confident, so strong. And I found myself defending him to people.

For a long time."

Photography by Norman Jean Roy

For now, we're sitting on lawn furniture, on a late summer afternoon, on the Paramount lot, as the sun starts to set.

McConaughey - fresh from finishing the GQ shoot - is dressed in loose-fitting Adidas tracksuit bottoms and the kind of misshapen T-shirt that can only speak to the six grabbing hands of three small children, all wanting a piece of their father. He pours red wine for us both ("I like a Cabernet," he singsongs, "at the end of the day"), leans back in his chair, chews tobacco, arranges the cinnamon toothpick that will rarely leave the corner of his mouth, tilts his head to the sun, smiles, and looks pretty much how you'd expect him to look: like a gambler who's just found a way to make the house bet on him.

When he won his Oscar - for playing the Aids-ravaged redneck Ron Woodroof in Dallas Buyers Club - it would, he assumed, be just another statue to his kids. When he got it home, however, his eldest, Levi, five, "was like, no, this is the one. This is the one, Papai." (McConaughey's wife is Brazilian.)

A couple of months later, when a tsunami hit Chile, "he asked me what a tsunami was, and if one could come here [to Malibu]. And I said, 'Yeah.' So he said, 'Well, what do we do?' And I go, 'Well, you grab your most prized possessions. We get the dog, we get the cat and we git out quick.' And he goes, 'But, Papai, we also take the Oscar, right?'" McConaughey lets out a joyous, barking laugh, before taking another sip of wine. He grins. "I was like, 'Good man! Good man! I'm glad you picked that up. Yes, we do.'"

Needless to say, he also derived a life lesson from this, which he dutifully wrote down, and which now sits in the high 700s: "Make choices that give the best residuals" (788). "Like, be less selfish. What choice are we going to make now that pays back down the line?" Partly, this line is about him - don't take the $8m now for another romcom; wait for the no-money part that could later bag an Oscar - but, as becomes clear with McConaughey, most of the lines he writes down now are actually lessons for his kids.

"It took eight months for people to stop sending romcom scripts"

"Kids don't think about later. Everything is right now. So that's what we're trying to teach them: delayed gratification.

Like, remember that time when Papai was skinny [he lost 47lb for Dallas Buyers Club] and I wasn't around much, and I couldn't go outside and play with you? Well, for the work I did then, a year and a half later, somebody deemed it excellent, and gave me a first-place trophy for it."

The story of how Matthew McConaughey came to make the switch from perpetual punch line to Hollywood golden child has been much told: simple and true as a fable, and all the more maddening for that. Just over five years ago, dissatisfied with his lot, he decided to make a change. He didn't tell his agent what he wanted to do, "but I told him what I don't want to do". It took eight months for people to stop sending romcom scripts, upping $8m offers to $10m and $12m, but he didn't flinch. "And after eight months, I remember my agent calling and he said, 'I think I got the message out.' And I said, 'How do you know?' And he said, 'Because nobody is sending shit.'"

And then, of course, the legend: first, after much wrangling over the choice of director, smart genre vehicle The Lincoln Lawyer. Then a psychopath in William Friedkin's pulpyKiller Joe; a drifter in Jeff Nichols' atmospheric indie Mud; an ageing stripper in Steven Soderbergh's Magic Mike; a film-stealing turn in Martin Scorsese's brilliant The Wolf Of Wall Street; a certain film called Dallas Buyers Club, rave reviews across the board; and finally, as if to show off, the best TV show of 2014 - True Detective, for which he was nominated for a Golden Globe. The comeback was so complete it even had a brand name: the McConaissance.

Photography by Norman Jean Roy

He had waited two years without work. Would he have waited longer? "I don't know, man. But by now, I'd have created something.

I wrote a lot in that time. I'd have directed something. Or done a documentary on scars."

Scars? "Yeah, scars, man! I still might do that. Every one has a story.

It's the original tattoo."

And yet, the itch that has never been adequately scratched is this: why? Or rather: why then? What changed?

Harrelson, who bonded with McConaughey over a drunken game of ping pong in the late Nineties, recalls a renewed dedication in recent years. The time, for instance, McConaughey was in the middle of his romcom wilderness years, and had the rare chance to work with Al Pacino in 2005 flop Two For The Money, "and he was staying in a trailer park - of course - in Vancouver and I crashed one night. But he wouldn't have a drink or nothing. The level of focus, he was so dedicated. He's always been dedicated, but this seemed like another level." Harrelson remembers when McConaughey made the final decision - "He only wanted to do work that was the highest quality" - but his friend never told him what triggered it.

Talk to the director of Dallas Buyers Club ("He badly wanted to do the film, but no, never spoke of the reason") or the director of Mud ("No, we didn't talk about it exactly") and it's the same story.

Photography by Norman Jean Roy

It's only when I speak to a friend of McConaughey off the record that it starts to become clear. "I think marriage and kids played a big part," the friend (who has asked to remain anonymous) tells me over the phone. "The older one gets, the more settled... I think he felt encouraged to take on roles that maybe would have scared him before."

I put this to Nichols, who says, "You know what, I do remember, when speaking ofMud, he said, 'This is the film, when he's older, I can't wait to show my son.'"

When I ask what becoming a father meant to him, McConaughey pauses, then says one word, "Lineage." Since he was eight, he says, "I always knew I wanted to become a father." And when it happened, he adds, it was like the world became flat. "And I started thinking of what shadow I wanted to leave."

It shouldn't come as a shock that the week before he made that fateful call to his agent, the call that would change everything, his wife had become pregnant with their first child. A boy, Levi, the one who said, "Papai, this is the one," about his father's Oscar. Who knew, in a tsunami, that's the thing you save. The boy who made his father beam with pride.

That can't, I say to him now, have been a coincidence. "No," he says simply. "No way."

But as ever with McConaughey, that's still only half the story.

McConaughey grew up in the small town of Uvalde, Texas, as the youngest of three brothers, in what can only be described as loving chaos. "On paper, if you write down our childhood," he says, "we'd all be in jail. We were outlaws, man. We were wild."

His parents, he says, "loved hard". They divorced each other twice but married three times - a bushfire relationship that McConaughey only truly knew the extent of later, when his father, known as Big Jim, died one Monday morning, in 1992, of a heart attack while having sex with his mother. "I just thought my mom was away on vacation," he says of the divorces. "Both times."

They were, he says, "a great family of bullshitters". Every night, they would have dinner and tell stories, each tale getting taller with the telling.

His parents were not conventional people. His mother, a teacher for 39 years, "never had a teaching certificate. She just finagled her way in, and would say it's in the mail. Then she would start teaching, and get such rave reviews, everyone would forget about it."

One time, he says, "she sat in class and went: 'This curriculum is stupid; we're not doing this,'" and decided to take them all on a field trip.

"My mom threw me in the river to teach me to swim. There was a waterfall with an 8ft drop just 20ft away"

Matthew McConaughey

"She put them on an Amtrak train, headed out to the Louisiana state line, and didn't come back till 10.30 that night. Without telling anybody." The parents thought their children had been kidnapped. "And there's cops and ambulances and all these worried parents, and they get off the train and they're almost going to arrest her! I mean, my mom, she's One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest."

Another time, he remembers, she decided to teach him to swim.

He'd had a couple of regular lessons - the kind that took place in a pool, with lifeguards - but she decided to speed up the process. "So she threw me in the Leona River. And there was a waterfall with an 8ft drop just 20ft away."

Photography by Norman Jean Roy

She stood on the bank and encouraged him while he attempted to tread water, getting ever closer to the drop. "Come on!" she shouted. "You know how to swim!" Eventually, he swam. "Now, some people would say that's barbaric. But it's not. That was just how you learnt stuff in our family. You get on with it."

His father, too, had his own idea of justice. Once, McConaughey's elder brother Pat - "a good athlete, a good fighter" - came home with a busted eye, a smashed nose and bruises. "What happened?" asked his father. "I got into a fight," said Pat. "Now," says McConaughey, "my dad knows Pat is a pretty good fighter, so he says, 'One guy?' My dad didn't believe him, and said, 'Tell me what really happened.'"

He'd actually been jumped by four guys.

So the next day, Pat was taken to school by his father, who went classroom to classroom, asking his son to pick out each boy, dragging each and every one out of class. "Pretty soon," he says, "the principal gets wind of this, and comes up and goes, 'Mr McConaughey, what are you doing?' And my dad says to him, 'You just back your ass off, I'm handling this, because evidently you can't handle your school.' Then he went downstairs to the gymnasium, with the principal still trailing after him, yelling, 'You can't do this! You can't do this!' And my dad says to him, 'You lock the door, or you're next.'"

So he locked the door. Big Jim lined up the boys in front of his son and said, "One on one, four times, let's go." "So Pat went one on one with all four of them, and whupped all four of them. After that, no one messed with Pat. My dad's brand of justice was incredibly cool."

Another time, he says, his father arrived at the Texaco gas station he ran, and which he prided on keeping spotless, only to find it had been spray-painted with a Hispanic tag. "And so my father goes to the church where the preacher is the head of the Spanish community, and in the middle of the sermon, walks up to the pulpit, and gets the guy in a headlock. And the guy is going, 'It wasn't me! It wasn't me!' And my father says, 'No, but they listen to you. Anybody leaves their signs on my gas station again, I'm taking it out on you, and you're all here to witness what I'm telling him.'"

The next day, says McConaughey, "that place was cleaned up! I mean, they'd painted over it, it was like new. My dad was a real badass."

Of course, McConaughey takes lessons from all of this. But the main thing his parents taught him, he says, is this, "Go make a buck. Go out-hustle someone. That was always the thing. Make a buck, and get up for work the next day."

For every project McConaughey works on, he can remember with astonishing accuracy every moment from every shot. He can also remember, for each role, the rhythm of the beat he thumped on his chest, which he does before every take, and for which no two roles, or rhythms, are the same.

This total recall can create problems. When he decided to watch the ground-breaking HBO cop series True Detective - the second series of which will see Colin Farrell and Vince Vaughn replacing McConaughey and Harrelson - as a regular viewer, for instance, shunning preview DVDs, he kept getting distracted by the many takes that hadn't been used. "Like, a scene cut together takes 30 seconds. But for me, two full days of history comes rushing back in. And I remember everything. I'll sit there thinking, 'Why didn't they use scene four? Why didn't they use that cut?' I don't know how or why, but I remember."

The chest-thumping, meanwhile, ended up on-screen, when Leonardo DiCaprio spotted him doing it before his scene in The Wolf Of Wall Street, and promptly suggested to Scorsese they put it in. "You know, we did five takes, I was happy with it, Scorsese was happy with it, and Leonardo was like, 'Hold on, what was that thing you were doing before the take?'"

He does it, he says, "to get a chant going, for whatever rhythm I think my character is in. I've found I need to find a rhythm. I'm more relaxed when I do."

McConaughey rule No 701: "Find your frequency."

But, he admits, there's another reason, too: "It does make some people go, 'What's he doing?' Which is good, because I'm on an island, and then I'm not explaining myself."

If the chest-beat defines the part, what, I wonder, was the rhythm for Interstellar - the insanely hyped new film from the highly secretive Christopher Nolan? "Hmm. Well, it's a slower, meditational beat when he's grounded, but when we get going out there, I'm like John Bonham [the Led Zeppelin drummer], banging on my chest."

This is what we do know, at the time of press, about Interstellar, partly from the internet, partly from grilling Nolan (over email), and partly from grilling McConaughey (over Cabernet Sauvignon).

Mankind is dying. Food and water are scarce. Somehow, we need to find a way to survive, and when a wormhole is discovered - connecting vast tracts of space - one presents itself. McConaughey, playing a widowed father of two, along with Anne Hathaway and others (Jessica Chastain and Nolan stalwart Michael Caine are also in the cast), must find us all a new home.

Photography by Norman Jean Roy

The posters show various planets - some consisting of nothing but shallow water, others with ridged mountains reaching down from the sky - and Nolan describes it as the mirror of Inception. Where that film had worlds within worlds, this is about worlds beyond worlds. According to producer Lynda Obst, the one-line pitch is this: "The most exotic events in the universe suddenly becoming accessible to humans." Nolan cast McConaughey, he says, because he loved him in Mud ("It opened my eyes to many subtleties of Matthew's work that I had been missing... but the truth is Matthew was our first choice before either Mud or Dallas Buyers Club had been released"). When McConaughey recently saw a screening of Interstellar, meanwhile, he cried three times. "I'll say this," he says, "it's the most ambitious film that Chris Nolan has ever directed. By far. It goes out there further than any story I've ever seen. The epic scale is larger, but also, the intimacy, the pulse of the movie. It's the most human film he's done as well. We're not dealing with archetypes like Batman. We're dealing with a guy, with family, with choice."

He knows there isn't a role more plum. "It's as big as it gets, man."

And, needless to say, McConaughey remembers every take.

Here is the funniest story Matthew McConaughey will tell me during the time we spend together.

It is his 40th birthday, and to celebrate he is camping with his wife and their newborn son, near the Grand Canyon. It is five years ago. Suddenly, he sees a ram about to charge him. And he is holding his infant son in his arms. "And I'm like, if he charges this way, it's not necessarily death, but it's definitely hospital." So, spotting his wife behind the ram, he throws his son across to her like an American football. "Through the air, man! And my wife catches!"

He later found out he was between the ram and his female lambs. "And," he says, "you never git in the way of that."

Clearly, a potential life lesson.

But here is the most important story - it is about how he lost his father, the man who made his brother a school legend, who got a priest in a headlock, whom McConaughey pictured looking down on him during his Oscars speech, with some shrimp gumbo to hand, and sipping on a beer. The man who died having sex with a woman he married three times.

McConaughey was 23, and a couple of days into a debut role that would make him: playing a jock slacker in the soon-to-be-iconic coming-of-age tale Dazed And Confused. All of a sudden he got a call: he had to go home, his father had passed away. He barely had time to pay his respects before he had to get back on a plane and finish the film. He sat with the director, Richard Linklater, and said to him, "I just got to keep living, man."

Because if there's one thing his father taught him, it was to go hustle. To make a buck. To get up, and go to work the next day.

It would be the first piece of advice he would write down. No1, with a bullet, on the McConaughey list of life rules. It would become the name of a foundation he would set up for disadvantaged students, a clothing line he would launch, and would even make its way into the film's script and cinema immortality.

Just keep living - because no matter how bad it seems right now, you just never know what may come next.

For now, he says, as we finish off the bottle of red, he's back to his family. To wife, Camila. To sons, Levi and Livingston. To daughter, Vida.

Before he goes, I ask him what his favourite life rule is? And that's when he says it. "If you want your jeans ironed."

Here's the story: it's 1995, and McConaughey had just got his first big pay cheque, $85,000, for Boys On The Side, and was living in Tucson, Arizona, with the full services of a maid. A girl he'd become friends with - Beth Alexander, the assistant to the director - came over one night, and asked how he was. "I'm great!" he said. "The work's good, I got this house on the edge of the desert, I've got a maid! She cleans my place, she makes my bed. She irons my jeans!"

Put another way: "Just because you can have something, it doesn't mean you should."

And so, that's what he wrote down: "If you want your jeans ironed."

It matters now, he says, this piece of advice, which sits way back in the single figures on the list, because it occurred to him not so long ago. One Monday, just over five years ago, when he made the decision to change everything.

It was a Monday like any other, and he had phone calls to return. There was a production company he was running. A music company, too. And for some reason, on this particular Monday morning, it made him despair.

Photography by Norman Jean Roy

"And I said to myself, 'I just don't want to get into that. At this time of life, I just don't.'" His wife had just become pregnant. "I said to myself: 'Why are you doing it then?'" So he shut them down, just like that. "And I said, 'I want to be three things. I want to be a husband. I want to be a father. And I want to be an actor for hire.' I had to start downsizing to get happier." He had to start saying no to romcoms. He had to find his frequency. To make choices that gave the best residuals. To start thinking what shadow he wanted to leave. To ask himself if, actually, he wanted his jeans ironed.

"My parents would say, 'Let's go do something where we'll have a story to tell.' That's what it's all about."

Matthew McConaughey

His agent was about to get a phone call.

It's a great story, but just before we part, there's time for one more. "You know," he says, "my parents would always say, 'Let's go do something where we'll have a story to tell.' Huh... I've never said that before. But I think that's what it's all about."

And there we have it, made before my eyes, Matthew McConaughey life rule No925: "Go do something where we'll have a story to tell."

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Ask him about it. He was with this journalist from England at the time. It's a good tale. "And sometimes," he adds with delight, "what's amazing, is when you know right when it's happening. You know? Like, 'Guys, you know where we're at right now, does everyone recognise? Does everyone see? We're in the middle of one." He squints at the sun. "We're about to have a legendary story to tell."